The Book Of Hulga

Paperback | March 25, 2016

The Book of Hulga speculates—with humor, tenderness, and a brutal precision—on a character that Flannery O’Connor envisioned but did not live long enough to write: “the angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth.” These striking poems look to the same sources that O’Connor sought out, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Edgar Allan Poe to Simone Weil. Original illustrations by Julie Franki further illuminate Reese’s imaginative verse biography of a modern-day hillbilly saint.

Pricing and Purchase Info

The Book of Hulga speculates—with humor, tenderness, and a brutal precision—on a character that Flannery O’Connor envisioned but did not live long enough to write: “the angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth.” These striking poems look to the same sources that O’Connor sought out, from Gerard Ma...

Rita Mae Reese is the author of the poetry collection The Alphabet Conspiracy. A past Wallace Stegner Fellow, she lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Educational/Developmental Value:

Durability:

Hours of Play:

Thank you. Your review has been submitted and will appear here shortly.

Reviews

Extra Content

From the Author

Rita Mae Reese is the author of the poetry collection The Alphabet Conspiracy. A past Wallace Stegner Fellow, she earned an MFA in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

1 The Given Lines Revising History The Reward J-O-B With Regina at LourdesThe margin is for the Holy Ghost Isn’t

2 How to Lose a Leg What Her Mother Knew When She Heard Welcome to Milledgeville Hulga’s Fairy Tales On the Problems of Empathy In Which She Reads the Humorous Tales of Edgar Allan Poe First Dream Phenomenology of Sow Exegesis: The Tempest Hulga as Sara in The Book of Tobit Who, Possessed of a Demon, Was Given Seven Husbands and Killed Each on Their Wedding Nights

3 Milledgeville Hazel Motes’s Sonnet Your Body Is a Temple of the Holy Ghost The Lame Shall Enter First The Life You Save A Bird Sanctuary Moral Error Theory Interlude: The Case of the Missing Virgin The Red Clay Virgin The Vanishing Point Hide & Seek Immaculate At 36, Hulga Speaks of Love Immaculate Rejections Second Dream

4 Casting Call for Temps Mort Interior of Hayloft, Day After Hours of Staring Out at the Pond Because She Wanted Mrs. Freeman Knows the Signs Birth Post-op

6 After Flannery’s Death, Regina Cleans Her Room Flannery O’Connor’s Peacocks Go to Heaven after She Dies Pieta with Regina Flannery, Are You Grieving?

Appendix: Quotes from Simone Weil Notes

Editorial Reviews

“If this rich collection of poems on [Flannery] O’Connor’s life, family, work, and religious philosophy is any indication, the wildly talented Rita Mae Reese is part of that die-hard fan club, too. It would be challenge enough for most poets to write a compelling sequence on any great artist, but Reese doesn’t just succeed in creating moving, original poems on O’Connor—she also inhabits the rhythms, tones, and voices O’Connor used in her own work.”—Tahoma Literary Review